Heart of Darkness and the Strange Hauntings of Liminal Experience

What Marlow Sees through the cover story of Enlightenment Liberalism. We need his vision in order to be fully human, and save us from the gods and monsters trap.

Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece Heart of Darkness features his great Hythloday-esque traveler narrator Marlow. Like Hythloday from Thomas More’s Utopia, he is an odd bird, even among his fellow sailors. Marlow is odd in almost every way, but his liminal status and counter-script existence affords him insights that are inaccessible to most, and he is an avat…